I know that I’ve said on numerous occasions that blogging is dead, but here I am.
As imperfect a medium as this is… and it really is… it’s the one I know. And I have a lot of stuff I feel that I need to work out. So here we are.
My wife and I separated after Thanksgiving. People seem to believe that when I use the word ‘seperated’ that it implies the possibility of this being temporary. It’s not. It’s over. Apparently, it’s a process. You seperate. You get lawyers. You divorce. I’m not clear on the details yet, but I’m not clear on a lot of things these days.
What happened? Who knows. Nothing really. It’s been over. For a long time. It just became the right time to acknowledge the reality of what was happening. She told me over a year ago that she wanted it over. She was right, but I was fixated on the concept. I didn’t want to be divorced. I should have been asking myself, ‘do you want to be married?’
After more than a year of ‘staying together for the kids,’ the reality that I didn’t want to live like this finally set in. And here I am.
I’m not sad that we split up. It was the right thing to do, I feel that with every fiber of my being.
But I’m not really happy either. I am trying to be. Trying to stay upbeat and positive.
Laugh it up. A lot of you that know me here, there or in the real world don’t think that I have it in me to be positive. You are wrong. I want to be positive. I want to believe that things are going to get better. That this change is actaully just what I needed. And a lot of the time, I DO feel like that.
But other times, it gets overwhelming. I’ve spent the past decade working towards a set of goals, an ideal, that has evaporated. And I find myself asking, Now what?
The reality is simple, in the real world I don’t have any real friends, I haven’t really socialized. I was a family guy. Go to work, come home and be with the fam. I have some sort of network of people here on the internet. But most of them are a lot like acquaintances. The long and the short of it is this: I suddenly find myself alone, out of my element and with no clear idea what I should do next.
I can’t keep on like this. I work. I come home and do nothing. Several well meaning folks have made many suggestions as to what I could do for fun… to get out. What they do not know or understand are these two facts:
First, I’m broke. I know, there is a recession, we are all broke. Be that as it may, we were barely keeping it afloat before, now trying to support two households is straining it to the point of breaking.
Second, I have serious social anxiety issues. It is so hard for me to talk to people, especially in a large groups of people. Suggestions like, go to such and such a place there will be loads of people there, are extremely stressful to me.
When I explain this… I often get the response, I was just trying to give you some advice… you don’t have to take it. The thing is, I don’t really need advice, at least not like that. I know what I want to do. It’s just hat I don’t know if I can do it.
So much in my life has changed. It’s not like going back to before I was married. I am a different (and hopefully better) person than I was then. It’s starting over from scratch. And I’m not sure where to begin.
So for starters, I’ll write about it. And we’ll see where it goes from there.
